


Knock First

by Anonymous



Category: Critical Role (Web Series) RPF
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, POV Original Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:49:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22104727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: A CritRole crewmember sees something she shouldn't, and resolves to never say a word. At least, that was the plan.
Relationships: Taliesin Jaffe/Matthew Mercer/Marisha Ray
Comments: 3
Kudos: 53
Collections: Anonymous





	Knock First

**Author's Note:**

> This is shamelessly self-indulgent. I have no excuse.

The wedding is six days out, and everyone is going slowly out of their minds. It’s not like crush times in other jobs Ally’s had - nobody is grim or angry or feeling pressured, exactly, they’re just… busy. The strange quality overlaying all of it is that everyone is happy. Everyone is genuinely excited. Nobody she’s talked to seems to mind the extra work that’s been spread evenly across everyone, and if anything they’re grateful about how carefully it’s been done. Mostly, Ally thinks all of this is proof that Marisha takes on way, way, way too much work on a regular basis, and she resolves to bring it up in the first staff meeting once everybody’s back.

It’s the tail end of Second Lunch, the number two shift ruthlessly instituted to make sure everybody actually stops working long enough to eat, and Ally is among the last few in the lounge. Max, in flagrant disregard of the rules of First and Second lunch, spent the entire hour furiously texting while eating a sandwich one-handed, and is just now meandering slowly out of the room, eyes still on his phone screen. All that remains is herself and Taliesin, who’s nodding over the rice bowl someone pushed into his hands forty-five minutes ago. Ally stirs the last few noodles around the bottom of her own bowl and considers whether she can actually bring herself to finish. Then Taliesin’s phone vibrates in his pocket, and he jerks upright, nearly dropping his bowl on the floor.

He sighs, and digs his phone out of his pocket, reads the screen, and chuckles, under his breath. He looks down at his unfinished lunch, then up at her. “You won’t tell on me if I just put this back in the fridge, will you?”

It surprises her. Taliesin is friendly with everyone, but he rarely initiates conversations with people he doesn’t know well, and that doesn’t apply with Ally. With Ally and anyone. It’s only been a year, and she’s never been good at that kind of thing. But the smile is genuine.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” she tries.

“I’ll eat it later, I promise. Just, I just realized I was supposed to be somewhere twenty minutes ago.” He gets to his feet, goes to tuck his lunch into the back of the fridge, moving a couple of other things in front of it to hide it from view, before heading for the door.

“The work of a man marrying two people is never done.” The joke has been going around for a while now, and this particular offering is mostly reflexive, despite the miniscule stutter, like every time. She says it on a laugh, thinking he’ll blush, wave it off, and keep walking.

He doesn’t - he takes a breath as though he plans to, but then he turns and looks at her, and…

She thinks, later, that it was the luck of a moment - bad luck or good, she couldn’t say. She wonders how often it comes up, because she knows a few people who joke about it. She’s heard the CritRole cast needling Taliesin, usually Liam and Brian making veiled suggestions, waggling their eyebrows ridiculously even as Sam addresses Liam as “my husband” and Laura and Liam spend most of a game in each other’s laps and Travis and Ashley cling to each other in fraught moments. Even before this particular joke started making the rounds, probably years ago, you could count on the fact that Taliesin and Marisha wouldn’t go a whole session without ending up wrapped in each others’ arms, including Matt if he happened to be playing; the same held true at cons.

They're all friends, really and truly, and they're a tactile group, even by the close-quartered standards of their strange little subsection of Internet subculture. It’s been going on long enough to have faded into the background; it’s rarely remarked upon anymore except out of reflex… at least, until the wedding was announced. Until Taliesin was “marrying them.” Until the fans got stirred up and emotions started running high and the jokes returned and Taliesin hasn’t been getting enough sleep and maybe his guard is down and...

If things had kept their pace, if he’d been in a hurry, if she hadn’t happened to be looking right at him when she said it, definitely thinking about what she saw that one time-

Her face must give something away, then - surprise, or curiosity, or something out of place - because he pauses, slowing to a stop with his hand halfway to the edge of the half-open door.

He looks at her, keenly, blue eyes sharp and harder than she’s ever seen him in real life, outside of a game and not playing a part. In response, she freezes. Taliesin is by no means a frightening person, the goth affectations aside - he’s far too warm and generous a human being to take it seriously, most of the time - but he does have an uncanny quality to him, gives the impression that there’s always a little bit more to him than you can see, at least in moments like these.

He stares and she stares back, deliberately relaxing her face into a neutral expression while trying very hard not to think exactly what she’d just been thinking. He moves again, slowly reaching out towards the door, glancing outside and then pushing it, softly, shut.

He looks away then, hand rising up to scrub across the top of his head. It’s become a habit, since he last cut his hair, a nervous gesture that comes out when he’s uncomfortable. He’s got a lot of nervous gestures, like the shake of his hands getting worse when his blood’s up.

They’re shaking now, but he’s not looking at her; he’s staring into the middle distance, facing a little away from her, lips pressed tightly together.

The silence is just getting uncomfortable when-- “Ally,” he says, slowly and quietly, voice very careful, “what do you know?”

She lets out a breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding, and he looks at her then, pale eyes darting to her face fast enough that she jumps, and then feels ridiculous. She slumps back into the couch, tired but tense. Taliesin’s not the only one who’s been working late to get ready for the wedding, taking on extra hours to cover Marisha… she feels tired down to her bones, but she can see the shiver of anxiety behind the carefully indifferent mask he’s wearing. He’s a very good actor, that much is certain, but she’s known him, seen him, enough, on screen and in person, to know his tells.

The longer she’s silent, the more his hands shake.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she says finally, and he stares at her, eyes still sharp and cold, searching her face, for a long several heartbeats. He takes a few steps across the room, but not all the way.

“You weren’t going to say anything about… what, exactly?” There’s a certain dangerous undertone, and for the first time she thinks that oh, all right, this is where the danger lies in Taliesin Jaffe. He’s been in the business most of his life, and she knows as well as anyone the cruel games people play with child stars, and as silly as Taliesin’s affected dark side seems sometimes she does know how fiercely loyal he is to his friends - to his family.

She holds up her hands, palms out, warding - “Do you really want to talk about this? Or would you rather go back to walking out of the room like I was just joining in on the joke? It’s worked this long.”

This apparently is enough to get him to break minimum safe distance, take the last few steps across the room. He hovers over the other couch for a moment, looking between the seat and Ally, and scoots it back a few feet, a little further away, like he’s creating a buffer zone. He sits.

“No,” he says, hands clasped together in front of him, fingers tightly clenched - to still the tremor, she guesses. “I’d rather you tell me what the fuck you know that when you joke about me and my two best friends in the world, you’re _not joking_.”

He says this in a low voice, soft as a whisper - his customary elegance gone, though his diction is perfect as always. She resolutely refuses to squirm - after all, she’s done nothing wrong, except fail to keep a secret she only gained by accident in the first place.

“I saw something once,” she admits, glancing at the closed door - closed, but not locked. There’s no lock on the lounge door. “Entirely by accident. I came around a corner into the green room in Indianapolis and…” She trails off, waits to see if he can fill in the blanks - and presently, the frown drops from his face, his face flushes slowly red, and he leans back in his seat, eyes rising to the ceiling, looking anywhere but her face.

“Oh,” he says, very softly and with pitch-perfect elocution, “fuck.”

She can feel her own face growing warm - her only shame is that she lingered a few seconds, at first not believing what she was seeing, but it was enough to burn it into her memory for all time. The low, battered couch tucked into the corner, the lamp at one end casting the three of them in a soft glow; it was relatively innocent for the most part, Taliesin in the middle, reclining half-asleep against Marisha’s chest with her fingers twined into his hair - at the time, it was a deep blue, and the contrast was striking, almost as striking as the way Matt leaned over them both, one arm between their bodies and the back of the couch and the other hand half under the hem of Taliesin’s t-shirt, smiling mouth pressed to the side of Taliesin’s throat.

As much as anything else, she remembered their faces: Matt’s sly, Marisha’s possessive, and Taliesin’s utterly contented, more relaxed than she’s ever seen him, even in hundreds of hours of edited footage. As much a polar opposite of what it looks like now - embarrassed, red-faced and right on the edge of panic - as could possibly be.

“Someone knocked something over in the hall,” he remembers, half to himself and his voice strained.

“Yep,” she agrees, remembering her own panic, once she’d backed out on silent feet, looked frantically up and down the hallway, and finding it vacant, shoved the metal sign stand over hard enough to leave a chip in the floor. But it was good - made a big enough noise that she could curse and carry on before going back in, finding them still on the couch, still close, but in slightly less compromising positions. She’d only had time to hope that her own blush could be explained by the mess she’d just made.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she says again, and he wheezes out a tiny chuckle of disbelief, and she’s irritated. “I _haven’t_ said anything,” she presses, letting just enough indignance colour her voice that he looks at her finally, surprised.

“No,” he agrees, still red-faced but a little less on the edge than a moment ago. “No. I’m sorry. You’re right. You haven’t.”

“No.”

He considers her then, the blush not faded, but fading. She crosses her arms. “Why?” he asks then.

She uncrosses her arms. “Why what?” He doesn’t say anything right away, just raises one eyebrow, expression vaguely cynical. “Why didn’t I ask deeply personal questions of people I barely knew? Why didn’t I sell it to the tabloids?”

He looks a little guilty almost right away. “Well,” he says shrugging awkwardly. “You know what it’s like.”

“I know it’s not like that in this building,” she says fiercely. “I know I’d be fired on the spot and blacklisted even if I was that kind of asshole. Jesus, Taliesin--” She starts to stand, intent on storming out of the room, but he reaches out and grabs her wrist as she rises, tugs gently, his eyes wide.

“No-- I’m-- don’t.” He lets go as soon as she stops, sinks back down onto the couch, holds up his hands the same way she did a minute ago, like a surrender. “I’m-- well, I won’t say I’m sorry for thinking it. But I’m sorry for thinking it of you, okay?”

She glares at him a moment longer, until he shrugs again, hands falling into his lap. “Fine,” she says. There’s a long moment where neither of them says anything, and then: “It wasn’t any of my business.” Now she shrugs. “The fact that you were in a public place where anybody could--” His cheeks go a little pink again. “That’s all I would have said. If I’d said anything.”

He looks at her curiously. “Why didn’t you?”

“Aside from the fact that it was none of my business?” Another shrug. “You looked… happy. All of you. I thought… well. There was obviously a reason you were keeping it private - private even from the others, I mean. I obviously get why it’s not common knowledge. But the others… the cast. They don’t know, do they?” He looks up, and she realizes her mistake immediately. “I mean-- fuck, forget I asked.”

“They don’t,” he says, talking over her, looking a little amused. “At least, not officially.” His gaze goes a little distant. “Some of them might… suspect. Or know, but we haven’t told them. We’re not as careful around them, because, you know. They’re family. But they’d never bring it up first.”

Liam, Ally thinks - Liam notices everything about everyone. And that means certainly Laura, because they take the twin thing more seriously than anyone really suspects - which may mean Travis, too, or may not. Ashley, maybe. Not Sam. Probably Brian. Actually, almost certainly Brian, Ally thinks, remembering certain offhand comments about the wedding and the honeymoon - not on Talks, but off-camera, like he was trying, sotto voce and gentler than most people think him capable of, to tease out an answer in exactly the way Ally had been trying to avoid. You can get away with saying a lot of things if everyone thinks it’s a joke. Knows you’re always joking. Dani? With her way of getting close to everyone she meets, seemingly by accident? Probably. If Brian does, definitely.

“It’s complicated,” Taliesin says, finally, in explanation for it all. Ally supposes “it’s complicated” covers a multitude of sins, but without much detail.

“I didn’t want to intrude,” Ally says.

“Well, if it happens again, please do, if only to warn us the fucking door’s unlocked,” Taliesin says with a laugh.

“I also don’t want to lose my job if--”

“Hey, no. We’d never do that. Hell, we don’t have the power to do that, even in this industry.”

Ally crosses her arms. “Marisha does.” She doesn’t think she would. Marisha can be ruthless, but she’s also a pretty good judge of character. But if either Matt or Taliesin wanted to destroy her career it would take nothing more than a single Tweet. They both underestimate their own influence.

“But she wouldn’t,” Taliesin says. He gives her a lopsided grin. “Marisha probably wouldn’t even be embarrassed.” Though god, she’d get endless shit about it from assholes on the Internet. He considers. “Matt might hide under his bed for a few weeks, but that’s because he prefers to do all his public affection in D&D form.” Taliesin looks down at his hands. “The truth is, it’s not a secret because of them. I mean, there’s the fallout if it came out, sure. That’s a nightmare no matter what the news is. But I’m the one they’re protecting.”

Ally frowns reflexively. What she saw didn’t look furtive - merely private.

“They’re not ashamed of me,” Taliesin hastens to add. His fair skin’s doing him no favours; the blush has gone blotchy. “And I’m not ashamed of-- I just. Don’t like having that kind of thing out in the open for everyone to see.” He scrubs at the top of his head again, nervously. “I really had enough of that by the time I was eleven.”

“I get it,” she says, when he doesn’t say anything for a while.

“Do you? I’m not sure I do.” He laughs again. “But we don’t talk about it that much - I don’t talk about it much, to anyone.”

No, she thinks, he probably doesn’t plan much of anything in that regard. His coming-out on Wednesday Club had every appearance of something done on the spur of the moment - an impulse of solidarity carried through to the screen. She wonders what would have happened if Amy had warned him ahead of time.

“It’s actually kind of…” He stops, frowning.

“What?”

“A relief.” He looks up at her, shrugging. “Talking about it. We don’t,” he adds. “It’s funny, I expected it to be… stranger.”

“You’re always strange.” The response is automatic, and he smiles.

“True enough.” Another shrug follows the first. “This… isn’t. Never has been.”

“I’m glad.” And she is. She thinks, rubs her palms together. Looks up again. “If you ever need to -- I know we’re not friends, exactly, but. If you need to talk about it…” She lets the thought trail off, and he studies her, lips pressed thin, for a long moment, before he laughs and gets to his feet.

“I think we’d better be, now,” he says, going to the door and pulling it open. “I think I’d better keep you close.”

And then he’s gone, and she sits there for a long while, the sweat cooling on her skin until she shivers.

***

She wonders if he’ll tell them. Matt and Marisha. She doesn’t think so, at least not right away, and goes on thinking that for a while. She actually forgets, a few times. For most of a year, she has little reason to think about it, apart from making sure everybody knocks before opening any closed door. But things are more or less the same. The big move comes along not long after the wedding, and she’s honestly too busy to devote much energy to thinking about this huge secret she’s accidentally let herself in on, or how many people might know she knows.

She does get an invite out with the cast the one Friday - not the first time, but one of only a few times she’s accepted. She’s not the only one, of course. Dani and just about every crewmember without kids tags along, and they take over the bar just down the road from the studio. She never knows what to do in situations like these - she’s been with the show for three solid years by this point, but she’s not really close with anybody, and she spends a while ducking in and out of conversations on either side of her before finding herself adrift, conversations taking place all around her but she, herself, isolate. The bar is an unbearable cacophony, just on the edge of too much. She nurses her drink and doesn’t notice that the group on her left has cleared out until Marisha throws herself down on the padded bench next to her.

“Hey, Ally. You hardly ever come to these things!” Marisha’s gliding a full pint glass across the table, another in her hand. She’s grinning, nodding to the drink until Ally takes it with a nod.

“Thanks,” she says, taking a sip. “It just hardly ever works out.”

“Well, glad you made it this time,” Marisha says, leaning back against the seat. “Fuck, I’m tired.”

Ally laughs, agreeing, and sips her beer.

“Honest to god I almost took a nap on the Talks set this afternoon, but Liam was already there.”

This is true. Ally went to set up the room for Tuesday and found Liam sacked out on the couch like he’d been knocked unconscious. It’s not unusual, but usually the unconscious body, since the move to their new digs, has been Travis.

“Imagine that, just stretching out on a couch in public where everybody can see you. Showin’ off your dad belly.”

Ally laughs, but the laugh dies away after a moment as the words sink in. She dares a glance to her left, finds Marisha with her head tilted back, drinking. A second later she puts the glass down, wipes at her mouth, and gives Ally a sidelong look.

Ally, predictably, feels her face flush slowly red. But Marisha just nudges their shoulders together, and when Ally dares to look at her again, Marisha just barely tilts her chin across the bar, to where a smaller booth is packed end-to-end with the rest of the cast.

Matt and Taliesin are pressed into one corner, Taliesin’s arm slung across the seat behind Matt’s back; Matt is leaning close, and to all appearances it would look like he’s just talking into Taliesin's ear to be heard over the background noise of the room, there’s absolutely no mistaking, now that she’s looking, the warm attention on Taliesin’s face, the bone-deep happiness of the smile that spreads across it as he shuts his eyes and laughs. As they watch, Matt grins, pushes his face against Tal’s shoulder, and then Taliesin’s arm drops to wrap properly around Matt’s narrower shoulders and pull him closer, press his cheek to the top of Matt’s head.

It’s nothing they don’t do in public all the time, and it could easily be explained away as something you’d find in a very close, very tactile friendship, but now that she’s looking she can definitely see certain quality that’s a little harder to explain away.

At her side, Marisha leans in to whisper: “Thanks for being cool.” And then she kisses Ally on the cheek and slides out of the booth.


End file.
